1897-1916

Wallace Stevens, as an enthusiastic admirer of Chinese landscape painting, went to a few exhibitions of Far Eastern art in Boston and New York. 1908-1909 : Wallace Stevens' interest in Oriental art spurred him to study the subject extensively. 1909 he did reading about Chinese art in the Astor Library, New York and copied what he considered to be essential in his journal. These included Kakuso Okakura's The ideal of the East and Laurence Binyon's Painting in the Far East. "Kakuzo Okakura is a cultivated, but not an original thinker". In his reading and viewing of Chinese art his taste appeared specially for Song landscape painting that illustrates the Tao or the Chan with unnatural clarity.